Study Finds MBA Graduates Seek Ethical Employers

Ninety-seven percent of MBA graduates willing to take 14% pay cut to work for ethical businesses

Staff GreenBiz

| August 5, 2004

The corporate world has garnered some bad press recently. The
fall of Enron has provided the public with an archetypal image of
corporate greed and corruption, and the disgust fueled by this
scandal has made its way into the business world itself. A survey
of more than 800 MBAs from eleven leading North American and
European schools found that a substantial number of graduates
viewed social responsibility and ethics as being somewhat higher
priorities than financial benefits when choosing an organization
for which to work.

While the study of graduating MBAs is a time-honored tradition,
expressing interest in their ethical standards when choosing a
business is not. 'There were no previous empirical studies that
indicated how important these additional job choice-related factors
might be,' said one of the researchers. The study found that a
company's reputation for ethics and caring about employees both
placed in the top third of a list of 14 factors, and that over 97
percent of MBAs would be willing to forgo some financial benefits
to work for a more ethical, socially responsible company. How much
money were they willing to sacrifice? Fourteen percent of their
income. Not surprisingly, these numbers are an increase from the
preliminary, pre-Enron study, which found that only 94 percent of
MBAs would give up 12 percent of their income to work for ethical
businesses.

The awareness of this new trend means that companies may become
more socially and ethically responsible to woo talented new
recruits. But human resources professionals have already been
touting ethical responsibility for years; the new survey is most
shocking to conventional wisdom, which holds that MBAs are
profit-driven corporate marauders with little regard for ethics or
accountability. Thankfully, the newest batch of MBAs portends hope
for the corporate world, even as Enron forecasts doom.
-- Brendan Themes